"What are some ways I can work on my nervous behaviors or overall lack of confidence? I've heard to take an improv or acting class, but those are not good options for me right now. Any advice?"
It's important to have confidence and there's a lot of ways to get confidence. A lot of times us worrying about what other people think about us, or bad experiences hurt our confidence in the past. There's all sorts of issues with why people are confident or why they're not confident.
One thing that I think is very important for confidence is - there's a famous class that used to be conducted in New York. I think it was at Columbia by this professor and it was called the confidence course. Every day you were supposed to write down all the things you were worried about and were causing you frustration and that you were worried and didn't feel confident about. And just do it every single day, over and over again.
And then you were also supposed to go back like once a week and look at all your previous things you'd written down and keep doing that. And I actually followed that process and it works. The reason is because you're realizing that most of the things you're not confident about, and most of the things you're not you're worried about are inconsequential things that are never going to happen. And over time you realize that most of the things that you think about that are negative are not giving you confidence. So that's really the big thing with confidence, I liked that lesson. I think it's positive.
Confidence is very important, an attorney needs to have confidence. You need to have confidence in yourself, but you also need to have confidence in the people that you're representing. And so confidence is huge. The more confidence you have, the better. It's one of the most important characteristics. And it's something that you need to develop.
